It is common today for homes and/or businesses to have multiple phone lines to accommodate telephone communications, facsimile transmissions and/or computer modems. In prior art systems, each component (a telephone, facsimile machine or modem) would typically have its own dedicated telephone line so that when operating the phone line was in use and otherwise went unutilized. This required multiple telephone lines although the multiple lines were seldom needed at the same time. This resulted in an undesirably large number of telephone lines which resulted in incurring high costs.
One prior art solution to the above problem was to create a user-operated switching box that allowed multiple components to share a single telephone line. In such a system, a user could select which component would occupy (utilize) the telephone line and the switching box operated as a multiplexer to selectively couple the telephone, facsimile machine or modem to the telephone line to make an outgoing connection. This prior art solution, however, had limitations since, for outgoing calls, the manual switching of the various components to the desired telephone line was often inconvenient and took additional time. This made the solution undesirable. In addition, in multi-line applications, the switching box could not automatically switch the call to an available line if an incoming call was made to a line already in use.
Accordingly, there is a strong need in the art for a system that allows for an automatic, transparent interface between multiple telephone lines and a modem within a home or business.